http://www.microsoft.com/

virtualization-consolidation.aspx

-: MS Windows Hyper-V 2005 R2 VS VMware VI3:-

This can really be misleading as for Microsoft Windows Hyper-V  you still

have to pay for the host operating system (Windows 2008), which is for some versions almost the equivalent of what you would pay for VMware 3.5. So if your virtual machines are not running windows 2008 and if you don't benefit of  the special licensing offered by Microsoft for running several Windows version in a virtualized environment then people should look at the cost of Windows 2008 as the cost of Microsoft Windows Hyper-V.  Anyway, if your guest are not Windows then the cost of windows 2008 is obviously only for the hypervisor which does not seems to us being free!!!! MS promised for a separate $29 version in the future, but not clear when and how.

In addition, in VMware VI3 you can run more virtual machines on the same specs machine as its running bare-metal and waste less resource than Microsoft Hyper-V solution and in many cases that it self will make up for the cost differences. Don't let the initial price fool you.

Testing & Development  

Environment

MS Hyper-V is still in beta and does not seems to be mature enough to run in production in the near future. It seems it will take a while for MS to get ready for production. in the other site VMware have been mature

enough for production environment for a while. It has been used by most of the fortune 100 companies in production. That prove readiness of VMware Virtual Infrastructure. It will take time for MS to prove the same.   

-: Microsoft Hyper-V  VS VMware VI3:-

security breaches even if only windows 2008 core service is running. In addition, not using underlying OS make it more resource efficient although  Hyper-V is using hypervisor technology equivalent to Xen which make it a lot faster than its previous virtualization product Virtual Server 2005, still got lot more constrains when compared to VI3 Infrastructure specially when it come to Linux and Legacy windows systems.

Although the final release will be a part of Standard/Enterprise /Datacenter Editions of Windows 2008 at the moment the beta is only fully included the x64 edition of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Release Candidate 1.

Microsoft are planning to integrate their Hyper-V with Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) and use it as its centralized management, but it still not integrated yet, but planned for the future. At the moment you have to manage it using Hyper-V Manager via MMC which allow you to manage the virtual machines running at one host at a time, But even when VMM get integrated with Hyper-V, Its not as rich as the VMware Virtual Center features wise as its still in its early days.

Microsoft might have more support resources than VMware,

that direction.

- Windows 2003 Standard/Enterprise SP1/SP2/R2 64-bit + Virtual SMP (Supported in Production) 

- MS Windows 2008

- MS Windows 2003

- SUSE Enterprise Linux Server  

  10 SP1   

Its obvious that VMware has production support for many more OS than Microsoft.  Actually supported guest operating systems in Microsoft Windows Hyper-V is very limited.

Its obvious at the moment that Hyper-V still lagging on Linux support, where VMware support running most version of Linux without the need to modify it, Hyper-V still only officially support SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10  SP1 at the moment. Other Linux versions that have Paravirtualized Xen Kernal should run at the moment, but still not officially supported. Even with the limited version of Linux being supported by MS Hyper-V it still not that easy to setup. To illustrate the required steps to setup Linux on Hyper-V read below:

Microsoft Hyper-V provides Integration Components for Linux OSes, which is currently a separate download that you need to register for on the Microsoft Connect beta testing site. It would been acceptable if the Integration Component for Linux OSes were straight forward to setup but it require many complicated steps and what worse you have to do the same steps over and over again for every Linux virtual machine including the following:

1- Manual installation of Xen Kernel.

   drivers.

Its clear that setting up Linux on VMware is way easier and cleaner than Hyper-V at the moment, but Microsoft might change that when the full release is ready to market.

- Higher Performance

- More virtual Machines per hardware

- Slower Performance

ITComparison

Comments

The performance advantage of VMware is related directly with it being

running bare-metal and have a smaller foot print than Microsoft Windows Hyper-V.

Live Migration

(VMotion)

High Availability

(HA)

Dynamic Resources

(DRS)

Storage VMotion (SVMotion)

Supported

Supported

Supported

Supported

Quick Migration (not real Live migration)

Quick Migration (Host Clustering)

NLB is all MS Offer !!

N/A

ITComparison

Comments

SVMotion is a new feature of VMware VI3 where and entire disk files of a virtual machine can be moved from one storage array to another without affecting the operation of that Virtual Machine. This mean VMware VI3 users can avoid downtime for their virtual machines when they need to carry a storage maintenance. It means as well they can easily upgrade or move to a new storage without the need for a down time. This feature has no equivalent in MS Hyper-V at the moment, which mean downtime for storage maintenance can't be avoided.

ITComparison

Comments

MS Windows Hyper-V still does not support booting virtual Machine from Virtual SCSI disk. It only support it from Virtual IDE disk which will highly slow the performance of these virtual machines. It is not clear yet if the final version of Hyper-V will support booting virtual machines from virtual SCSI disk as no announcement on that have been made. If MS does not come up with boot from virtual SCSI then they are risking their product of a very bad performance lag behind VMware which has that capability.

ITComparison

Comments

VMware VCB Is a great backup advantage as you can with it take live backup (image) of running virtual machines without affecting the performance of the host neither the virtual machines performance, where with MS Hyper-V that still seems to depend on the host capabilities using the Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) to enable you to take Live Backups of running virtual machines in terms of snapshots, but still affect the Hyper-V Host performance while the backup is running.

64GB of RAM

4 CPU

64GB of RAM

4 CPU

ITComparison

Comments

Although Microsoft has been good in keeping up with numbers for marketing, still VMware can offer a better specs virtual machines for most Operating systems beside windows 2008. At the moment, 4 virtual CPUs are only recommended on Windows Server 2008 RC1 with Hyper-V Beta. Its not even recommended to use more than one virtual CPUs with Windows 2003 at the moment, but this hopefully would be resolved when the final release arrive. The following quote is directly from Microsoft Hyper-V release note:

==============From MS Hyper-V release note Begin============

Configure the virtual machines as follows:

For the guest operating system, install one of the following:

ITComparison

Comments

It seems Microsoft has forgotten again that many companies have some older hardware that does not run 64-bit and would like to virtualize their environment. MS Hyper-V force companies to obtain a newer more expensive hardware to be able to virtualize.